For 4 years now I’ve been advocating for Ghanaian filmmakers to consider paying Social Security and National Insurance Trust popularly known as SSNIT (the informal SSNIT Scheme) for actors and also insure the actors they contract or cast for their movies.
Whilst some of the filmmakers pooh-poohed me for suggesting something that is not feasible, others rather threw a challenge at me; “wait if you become a filmmaker, then you can do what you are suggesting,” “it comes with cost so we can’t do it,” “what you are advocating for is not even done in Hollywood, how much more Ghana.” Those were some comments I sampled from some filmmakers I spoke to years back.
I even went further to investigate if our actors gets proper oral or dental screening before they are casted to kiss in movies and actors Van Vicker, Roselyn Ngissah, Ebi Bright, and others revealed to me that they are not medically screened before casted for roles that involve kissing.
Read below a sad story I recently read about Nollywood – Nigeria’s movie industry, of how an actor nearly ended his life in the name of acting:
